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Beat Depression

Article by Reea Pawley

We make ourselves feel anxious or depressed because of what we are doing inside our minds. We do it to ourselves.

No-one else has the power to make you think or feel anything…only you can do that. Other people don’t make us feel bad, they may have done something that was unkind, hurtful or completely mean but how you responded to that is all about you and not about them. You do not take responsibility for someone else’s actions, they are responsible for their own behaviour but you are responsible for your response to it. We all choose our own thoughts and perception and those thoughts bring an emotional response from our bodies. We choose what we are going to focus on, what arguments we will replay over and over again and what we think about ourselves. It is when these thoughts are continually negative that depression and anxiety become our regular way of being.

The way out of this negative state of being is to get in control of our thoughts and feelings, reconstruct our perception of ourselves and the world and do constructive things that make us feel good each and every day of our live.

What we need to do is take control of ourselves and focus our attention on feeling good and stop focusing on feeling bad. When you make the decision that you want to feel good, that feeling good is the most important thing in your life and you will settle for nothing less, then real change can begin. When you feel good everything works better, you are a better husband, mother, sister, employee and your life becomes almost effortless rather than a daily struggle to survive. When you practice feeling good you are loving yourself and you are in the flow.

Feeling good is the key

This isn’t rocket science, it is extremely simple. What have you done today to make yourself feel good? What did you do yesterday? What conversation did you share in, or activity did you engage in, that you knew before you even started would end up making you feel worse? This is about self-awareness. When you love someone you have a driving desire to get to know everything about them. Do you know yourself?

How do you do depression and anxiety?

What is your strategy? What thoughts do you hold, what things do you do, what do you say to yourself to make it happen? How do you know when its time to be anxious? Are you very good at it? Most people who suffer from depression and anxiety are. They’ve practiced it over and over again until they are great at it! We don’t know that we are doing this because no-one ever taught us to be any different. Some people have been lucky and had role models in their life who modeled a happier perspective but even people with positive, happy parents can end up living with depression.

Joan (not real name) was a 65 year old woman who came to see me for her depression which she almost defiantly told me she had had for the past 15 years. She barely left the house, did not participate in her children’s and grandchildren’s lives to the extent that she would have liked and felt no joy in anything. She watched TV most of the time or stared out the window. She was on anti-depressants and like a lot of people’s experience, they hadn’t made much difference but she took them any way. She had been to counselors, done Beyond Blue and tried a range of things to feel better but nothing had worked. I got the very strong impression that she didn’t think seeing me would help either but she was willing to see me to please her daughter. After four sessions Joan swept into my office with a huge smile on her face and told me she had been back to her doctor and he had halved her medication. She said that for the first time in years she actually felt wonderful. “‘What”, I asked her, “have we specifically done that had made such a huge difference to the way you feel”. “It was when you said to me that if I wanted to be miserable I could and no-one could stop me, that I was doing it to myself and if I wanted to feel better I could do that to. No-one has ever told me that before, they all told me I had an illness.” I was flabbergasted as you can imagine, so much change in so little time from something so simple!! Why had no-one ever given her the power to help herself before? Why do we take away each others hope when without it we have nothing?

Why does western medical science want us to think we are broken and need fixing, that we are sick and need medicating? It reminds me of the Australian Aboriginal practice of ‘pointing the bone’. If they pointed the bone at an enemy, the enemy’s belief that they were going to die was so strong that they would die. When doctors diagnose you with depression you begin to see and believe you are an illness, not a person who is practicing being negative by default. Doctors are powerful in our society and we believe what they tell us. I’m not saying that they aren’t doing a wonderful job to the best of their ability, I’m just asking you to consider for a moment the power they have over us and that they don’t know everything there is to know about the human mind and consciousness. Scientific knowledge like all other knowledge is in a continual state of growth and expansion and they routinely have to reassess their strongly held beliefs, theories and conclusions. One of the areas they have had to reassess since the expansion of understanding in quantum physics and quantum biology is what really makes us tick and how our minds work. Even the Australian depression website, Beyond Blue, has recently changed references to ‘chemical imbalances’ as a cause of depression and now say that when you get depressed it results in a chemical imbalance. It’s a chicken and egg thing, did the unhappiness cause a chemical imbalance, did the chemical imbalance cause the unhappiness, is their really a chemical imbalance? If that theory were really true then the hundreds of clients who walk through my door on medication wouldn’t need me.

by Reea Pawley

23 Jun 2014

Article/Information supplied by Reea Pawley

Disclaimer - Any general advice given in any article should not be relied upon and should not be taken as a substitute for visiting a qualified medical Doctor.